Silver halide photographic light-sensitive materials are required to offer high image quality properties such as excellent sharpness and color reproducibility.
It is a common practice to incorporate a dye in a silver halide photographic light-sensitive material to improve image quality or to adjust silver halide emulsion sensitivity. For example, dyes are used in anti-halation layers, anti-irradiation layers and light absorbing filters.
In recent years, there have been increasing photographic applications of dyes, including dyes used to substitute for yellow colloidal silver (hereinafter referred to as YC dyes) in color photographic light-sensitive materials, dyes used to dye crossover cut layers in radiographic light-sensitive materials, and dyes used to dye non-light-sensitive layers in photographic light-sensitive materials for graphic arts.
Dyes used for these purposes are required to meet various requirements, depending on the purpose of their use, including the following:
1) Have a good absorption spectrum. PA1 2) Do not diffuse from the colored layer to another layer. PA1 3) Do not photographically affect the light-sensitive silver halide emulsion. PA1 4) Stable in the silver halide photographic light-sensitive material. PA1 5) Easy to add. PA1 6) Stable in the emulsion coating solution, having no effect on solution viscosity. PA1 7) Do not leave color after processing.
To meet these requirements, a large number of dyes have been proposed, including azo dyes, the oxonol dyes disclosed in British Patent No. 506,385 and Japanese Patent Examined Publication No. 22069/1964, the merocyanine dyes disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 2,493,747 and the styryl dyes disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 1,845,404.
Dyes whose diffusibility has been suppressed to allow dyeing a particular layer are known, including non-diffusible YC dyes such as those disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,538,008, 2,539,009 and 4,420,555, Japanese Patent Publication Open to Public Inspection (hereinafter referred to as Japanese Patent O.P.I. Publication) Nos. 204630/1986, 205934/1986, 32460/1987, 56958/1987, 92949/1987, 222248/1987, 40143/1988, 184749/1988 and 316852/1988. As means of suppressing dye diffusibility, methods of dyeing a particular layer with a solid dispersion of dye are described in Japanese Patent O.P.I. Publication Nos. 120030/1980, 155350/1980, 155351/1980, 12639/1981, 27838/1988 and 197943/1988 and PCT-WO-88/04794. However, these dyes show residual color staining after ultra-rapid processing, requiring further improvement.
There is a need for a new non-diffusible dye which has improved storage stability, which prevents sensitivity loss over time and which suppresses residual color staining by improvement of bleacheability.